The $7 million in annual recurring revenue Cluely co-founder and CEO Roy Lee shared with TechCrunch last summer was a lie, Lee acknowledged on Thursday at X. “This is the only blatantly dishonest thing I have said publicly online, so this is my official retraction,” Lee wrote.
However, his post about
“I got a random cold call from a woman asking for my phone number and I told her some information, but I wasn’t expecting an article about it,” Lee said in the same post.
But that call came about because Cluely’s publicist emailed TechCrunch and offered to provide Lee with an article. At 8:38 a.m. on Friday, June 27, 2025, Cluely’s publicist sent an email to TechCrunch reporter Marina Temkin saying, “We’d like to set up an interview with Roy. Whether you want to learn more about what’s next for Cluely or a new perspective on his vision, we’d be happy to make it happen.”
Temkin agreed. The public relations manager shared Lee’s phone number and confirmed that he was waiting for a call. After several attempts to contact Mr. Lee, he answered the phone and conducted the interview as scheduled.
TechCrunch was interested in talking to Cluely because in the summer of 2025, Cluely was a viral startup that was working on a “cheat for everything” phenomenon, allowing users to secretly find answers during video calls without being detected. The company was founded after Lee posted on X that he and his co-founder had been suspended from Columbia University after developing a tool to cheat software engineers from job interviews.
The co-founders raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for Cluely as they looked to commercialize the tool that got them off the ground. It is positioned to allow online interviewees (or anyone) to secretly find answers to their questions without detection. For a while, it seemed like Cluely would be such a success that it would spawn a counter-industry of detection tools designed to catch people who use them.
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Last June, Cluely raised a $15 million Series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz. By then, the company had mastered the art of creating provocative content designed to go viral, using stunts to keep Cluely in the headlines and attract new users. Strategy was the talk of the town. Lee also discussed how successful outrage-bait marketing strategies can be for early customer acquisition at TechCrunch’s 2025 Disrupt event last October.
He declined to share updated revenue figures at the time, but pointed out that marketing alone isn’t enough to build a sustainable business when the product is still in flux. “What I learned is you should never share revenue numbers,” he told the Disrupt audience.
Cluely has since rebranded itself as an AI-powered meeting note taker. But Lee appears to have forgotten his own advice, as he admitted to lying on Thursday and posted the numbers to his Stripe account.
